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Recipes
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The hand pie may be one of the world’s best food creations. Whether it’s a piroshky, a Pop Tart, a beerock or an empanada, the idea of tucking something sweet or savory into a little pocket of dough is an idea embraced by food cultures the world over. It’s an easy way to have a snack or a meal on the go with relatively minimal mess, which makes these Black Bean and Sweet Potato Empanadas perfect for back-to-school and back-to-work lunch boxes. (I know, I don’t want to think about it, either, and I don’t have kids).03
The back to school stuff is going in Target, heralding the end of the summer. Soon enough it'll be time for backpacks and lunchboxes and binders, but before we give ourselves over to F-A-L-L, it's time to worship at the altar of the Hatch chile. Last summer I froze 25 pounds worth and it looks like I was pretty stingy in doling out the chiles over the year since I still have several bags in the freezer. But there's nothing like fresh roasted, and stores across the country are already breaking out their roasters with events starting this weekend.30
This wasn't supposed to be a blog post, just dinner on Monday night. There are no photos of cherry tomatoes casually rolling toward the edge of the counter, or a scatter of pasta strategically positioned behind the bowl. There's not even a fork, just a quick snapshot because I was texting it to Wolf to get him to hurry up on home. Then, I was pleasantly surprised by how fast and delicious it actually was, so, well, here we are. Gemelli con salsiccia e pomodorini…which sounds fancy, no? Gemelli with sausage and cherry tomatoes. Let’s go.
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A couple of weeks ago on the Splendid Table, LA Times Food Editor Russ Parsons wrote, “The thing that's really great about this book is that he takes what might seem familiar and just throws a twist on it. When you cook it, it's an act of exploration because you're doing things that you know, the ingredients are fairly familiar, the techniques are fairly familiar, and then boom, there's this very new and exciting result that really makes you want to cook more into it.”
He was talking about < Ottolenghi's Plenty
, but he hit it on the head for Jerusalem
,too. It’s the twists that set these recipes apart. And it's never more true than with Naama’s Fattoush, the marquee recipe for this month's salad theme for Tasting Jerusalem.12
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How many times have you moved as an adult? Me, 11 times. It’s never fun, and it gets worse, the older you get. Once, early on when I moved from LA to the Bay Area, I shipped a bunch of stuff by mail. Moving by mail is not a great idea. Unless you want to buy all new stuff. Then finally there comes a time when there’s no more rounding up friends with promises of beer and pizza. You just bite the bullet and hire movers. After 11 moves, I can’t believe some of the things that have made the trek. I’ve been looking for a peach pit ring that my grandpa carved, at least that’s how I remember it. I'm convinced I have it somewhere. And I can’t find it.
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Sometimes you just need things to be easy and uncomplicated. To cap off a long week, you want something familiar. Something simple and delicious. That’s what this chocolate pudding is, just simple. No parfait treatments or graham cracker crusts or whipped cream dollops here -- just good ol' pudding. Where the box variety suggests chocolate flavor, this pudding doesn’t skimp. It's sweet, simple, and seriously chocolatey without being too rich.
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I’ve been, let's call it what it is, short my entire life. On my tallest day, coincidentally, the day I got my driver's license, I was 5'1. So when you find a pair of pants that fits without needing alterations, you buy three pairs in black and never look back. It’s the same thing with pizza dough. When you find a dough recipe that works, you just keep on with it. For me, that’s been the Food Lab’s NY-style pizza dough. But after awhile, you start to need another pair of pants. What I really wanted was a whole wheat crust. So I started tinkering with my tried and true. Tinkering until I got the Food Lab’s NY-style pizza dough to go whole wheat.